This week’s travel theme from Ailsa’s blog ‘Where’s my backpack?’ is Close-Up. I love photographing big landscapes and big buildings, but the thing I get very close up on quite often are animals. After all living in an dense urban environment doesn’t offer too many wild critters to photograph other than birds. What I realised about this collection of photos from my travels is that all the photos are from or near seaside locations.

First photo is from our night dive with manta rays off the Big Island of Hawai’i. The rays were huge, and they got so close to us. Those patterns that you can see underneath the ray on its “belly” are unique for each ray and are used to identify the different fish. I posted a video of our dive a few months back, you can find it here.

Across the Pacific Ocean, and all the way to Thailand. We went on a cruise run by locals in the Andaman Sea among the small islands. I was surprised to see these monkeys on outcrops of rock. Apparently these guys eat sea crabs. They were so close that I could have reached out and patted him (but I didn’t after having visions of ebola being transferred via the bite of a monkey).

Back at home in Australia, one of the most amazing places that we have ever visited is the Great Barrier Reef and the Whitsunday Islands in Queensland. We stayed on Hamilton Island when we went there and it is a good base to travel to the other islands in the Whitsunday chain or the outer reef. Hamilton Island itself is amazing and it is very easy to get away from the accommodation zone into wild bushland. Here are a couple of possums up to no good when we went on a trek at night in the wooded area on the Southern side of the island.

Out on the reef itself, it was surreal swimming among the fishes in what was an amazing wonderland of colour and shapes. I struggle with snorkeling and scuba diving (it’s the breathing) even though I enjoy them both immensely. But I absolutely cr@pped myself when my wife pulled my fin and pointed to barracudas. As I turned back around, these fish were directly in my face. Surreal.

Closer to home, we used to go down to Jervis Bay in NSW quite often. Fishing down there is amazing, but one particular trip to Currarong the best thing that I caught was a photo of this little critter – an echidna 🙂

Finally in Calalla Bay in Jervis Bay, this little crab outstretched was not even close to being bigger than my hand. He was straining with all his might to resist the water with every tidal lunge.